OF A CERTAIN REMAINDER OF LOVE THAT OFTENTIMES RESTS IN THE SOUL THAT HAS LOST HOLY CHARITY.
THE life of a man who, spent out, lies dying little by little on his
bed, hardly deserves to be termed life, since, though it be life,
it is so mingled with death that it is hard to say whether it is a
death yet living or a life dying. Alas! how pitiful a spectacle it
is, Theotimus! But far more lamentable is the state of a soul
ungrateful to her Saviour, who goes backward step by step,
withdrawing herself from God's love by certain degrees of indevotion and disloyalty, till at length, having quite forsaken it, she
is left in the horrible obscurity of perdition. This love which
is in its decline, and which is fading and perishing, is called
imperfect love, because, though it be entire in the soul, yet
seems it not to be there entirely; that is, it hardly stays in the
soul any longer, but is upon the point of forsaking it. Now,
After a long habit of preaching or saying Mass with deliberation, it happens often that in dreaming we utter and speak
the same things which we should say in preaching or celebrating; in the same manner the custom and habit acquired by
election and virtue is, in some sort, afterwards practised without
election or virtues since the actions of those who are asleep have,
generally speaking, nothing of virtue save only an apparent
image, and are only the similitudes or representations thereof.
So charity, by the multitude of acts which it produces, imprints
in us a certain facility in loving which it leaves in us even after
we are deprived of its presence. When I was a young scholar,
I found that in a village near Paris, in a certain well, there was
an echo, which would repeat several times the words that we pronounced in it: and if some simpleton without experience had heard
these repetitions of words, he would have thought there was
some one at the bottom of the well who did it. But we knew
beforehand by philosophy that it was not any one in the well
who repeated our words, but simply that there were cavities, in
one of which our voices were collected, and not finding a passage
through, they, lest they might altogether perish and not employ
the force that was left to them, produced second voices, and
these gathering together in another concavity produced a third,
the third a fourth, and so consecutively up to eleven, so that
those voices in the well were no longer our voices, but resemblances and images of them. And indeed there was a great difference between our voices and those: for when we made a long
continuance of words, they only repeated some, they shortened
the pronunciation of the syllables, which they uttered very
rapidly; and with tones and accents quite different from ours; nor
did they begin to form these words until we had quite finished
Now this is what I would say. When holy charity meets a
pliable soul in which she long resides, she produces a second
love, which is not a love of charity, though it issues from
charity; it is a human love which is yet so like charity, that
though afterwards charity perish in the soul it seems to be still
there, inasmuch as it leaves behind it this its picture and likeness, which so represents charity that one who was ignorant
would be deceived therein, as were the birds by the painting of
the grapes of Zeuxis, which they deemed to be true grapes, so
exactly had art imitated nature. And yet there is a great
difference between charity and the human love it produces in
us: for the voice of charity declares, impresses, and effects all
the commandments of God in our hearts; the human love which
remains after it does indeed sometimes declare and impress all
the commandments, yet it never effects them all, but some few
only. Charity pronounces and puts together all the syllables,
that is, all the circumstances of God's commandments; human
love always leaves out some of them, especially that of the right
and pure intention; and as for the tone, charity keeps it always
steady, sweet, and full of grace, human love takes it always too
high in earthly things, or too low in heavenly, and never sets
upon its work until charity has ended hers. For so long as
charity is in the soul, she uses this human love which is her
creature and employs it to facilitate her operations; so that
during that time the works of this love, as of a servant, belong to
charity its mistress: but when charity is gone, then the actions
of this love are entirely its own, and have no longer the price
and value of charity. For as the staff of Eliseus, in his absence,
though in the hand of Giezi who received it from him, wrought
no miracle, so actions done in the absence of charity, by the
simple habit of human loves are of no value or merit to eternal
life, though this human love learned from charity to do them, and
is but charity's servant. And this so comes about because this